NYC has sparkle ponies pretty much year around. You learn to ignore them after a while. I'm from a pretty small farm town in Texas. What you learn after a while in a big city is that anyone who is trying to get your attention is trying to take your money. Sometimes it's a sparkle pony hooker; sometimes it's Comcast. Other times it's someone who went to burning man "when it was cool."
Every individual I've ever met who went to burning man was irritating, broke, begging for money, and full of "good" business ideas that were either "stolen" by huge megacorporations or just straight up idiotic business ideas "that would totally work if people weren't so close minded."
Whatever. My experience is anecdotal, and I'm not going to judge 8000 people based on my interactions with a couple of dozen.
Wait, no, that's not true. I'm totally judging all of them. You want a real human experience with unsanity and sharing and creativity and ugliness and real human stuff and burning things?
Go home to where you live. Be poor there. Hell, be moderately wealthy there.
Look, I'm about as in favor of arts and philosophy as a person can be. I spent 20 years as a professional violinist before I got in to technology. I spent years teaching music theory and history. Now that I have a better living as a developer, I volunteer for a dance company in Brooklyn, and I run an El Sisteme program in the Philippines with my brother.
I get it. There are more important things in the world than material wealth, and exploring yourself and other people in a non-traditional way is valuable.
But this is ridiculous. There are better and more honest ways to do this than burning man.
BM pisses me off because it's a waste of resources. All those people in the desert doing whatever it is they do is person-power that could be directed at a worthy cause that could accomplish the same thing.
Aside from my volunteer work I write 8 checks a year, for a thousand bucks a piece. I give them explicitly to the kinds of orgs that I don't work with on a daily or weekly basis. I give my time to orgs I know and love and care about. I give my money to those that I don't.
You want to do something good for you? You want to find out who you truly are? You want confidence to know that you're doing okay? You want to find out if your ideas have legs?
Spend a day with the homeless. Go to a foreign country and teach their poor what you already know.
Spend your Burning Man money on something that is worthwhile and will actually teach you something about yourself and your fellow man.
I really, really, really strongly despise Burning Man people. You don't actually want good for yourself or for others; you just want to feel like you are good to yourself and others.
Fuck you, I hate you all.
I hope that a hater on HN has now ruined burning man.
The best and most intellectually honest thing BM could do right now is shut the whole thing down. Burn it down.
But that will never happen. And we all know why. BM is a business now.
Businesses never commit suicide. Only people do. Maybe think about that the next time you want to go to burning man. Just sit on a phone waiting for someone who has a problem that's so bad he or she wants to end it.
None of you will ever do that because you are extreme and insane narcissists.
We are fucked. We live in a world where it's sort of okay for David Foster Wallace to kill himself, but it's also okay for idiots to go to burning man to "find" shit.
To put it the way the kids do: "I can't even . . ."
This entire comment is deeply ignorant and ill-spirited. You don't understand Burning Man. There's nothing wrong with that; it's not an easy thing to understand, particularly if all your knowledge is second-hand anecdotal.
Where you go astray is when you pass judgment anyway. You are not qualified to judge the moral value of peoples' experiences at Burning Man any more than they're qualified to judge the value of your own experience and efforts.
There's a lot to legitimately critique about the event. I'm sorry you feel unwilling to see it at face value - at which point interesting discussions can really happen - and instead want to go for a fatalistic scorched earth policy of bringing down an entire community based on your own biases and personal projections.
That community will continue to welcome you if and when you ever approach it with some humility.
I really cannot say anything either way on BM, having never been on the same continent and all. I do respect your point, violently creative energy is a spontaneous phenomenon to me, something that emerges on the fringes and gains momentum inversely proportional to its factor of acceptance. I for one, ex *-addict turned sysadmin with a few stories from the darker corners of life, have found that to be generally the case, but there are exceptions every now and then. I know very little about BM, people here only rarely have heard of it and of those nobody ever went, so one person tells tales of a drugged out Sodom & Gomorrha kind of place, others of a syndicalist camp, others again of pretentious Silicon Valley guys letting off steam playing the bohemians for a week. Don't know what is true, no immediate plans to find out.
What I strongly, absolutely, vehemently dispute is that David Foster Wallace killing himself was anything but the worst hit English literature took, ever. Guy wouldn't have been as sharp and witty and beautiful without a long standing relationship with pitch black despair, but man how I wish he'd have lived to produce an oeuvre of Pynchonesque dimensions.
In specific response to your pondering the many faces of Burning Man - at core it's a temporary city of 70,000 people. That means it's a large and diverse place. That's why you can hear so many wildly different stories about what kind of place it is - it's each of those to the different people who seek those things.
Think of it like any other city - is New York a debaucherous party destination? A crucible for art and theater? A whitewashed yuppie land of banks and condos? An immigrant melting pot? A loud and dirty merry-go-round that never stops? A home of amazing, beautiful, inspired people who try their hardest to craft a community where people can live and thrive?
It's all of those things. And more. Cities are too complex and diverse to be reduced to a single dimension. Burning Man is no exception. There's a reason they call is Black Rock City.
In that sense, it's in so many ways a reflection of whatever you seek and however you feel. If you go into it looking to party that's what you're going to find. If you bring open energy and enthusiasm for your fellow human being, and a desire to simply connect and bond with others, you'll find that in bounds. If you bring a fear of pretentious Silicon Valley tycoons using it as their own self-serving dumping ground, you can find that if that's really where you want to direct your energies. And so on.
That's of course also why you'll continue to hear so many varied opinions on it (and so many explanations of how it's been ruined). Some people are convinced it's the epitome of civilization's decline. Others see it as the most important and nurturing community they've ever known. Etc. It's large and diverse enough to serve as a really big mirror to all the myriad ways people project their own identities onto it.
Dude, it sounds like you REALLY need a big HUG! Don't worry - I love you man.
Here's a virtual hug for you! Really great post and some insightful points of view that really make me think about what you are carrying along for the ride. I hope your post helps open your own mind to all of our biases, preferences and unanswered questions that everyone faces daily.
Seriously, you infuriate me with your writing, and I want you to do more of it so I can get more infuriated! I've upvoted you. Everyone who downvoted you just proves I was right to do so.
